All-Day Breakfast (53 page)

“There a school up there, up north?” asked Cam.

“Homeschooling. My mom. They build volcanoes.”

He rolled his eyes, then lifted his beard amiably at someone behind me.

“It's not about the education, really,” I said. “I want them near at hand.”

“Oh, they came along?” His eyebrows went up, which his beard somehow exaggerated—the beard was ridiculous. “Steer 'em over here!”

“I didn't bring them.”

“Oh, good, well, that makes sense. Guess I better get this thing started.” He lifted his arm away. “There'll be a memorial for your elevens, you want to say something?”

“There's a memorial
this
year?”

“They would've been graduating.”

“But there wasn't one last year?”

“There was one last year.”

He stared at me dully, then turned, winked at a mom who'd been pulling hay out of her pant cuff, then made his way through the crowd, stroking his beard and squeezing every shoulder he passed. He made it look easy. I couldn't imagine the number of people he must've been ready to strangle when he heard about PBF, twelve of his eleventh-graders burned to death.

He climbed onstage and thudded his finger against the microphone.

“All right, grads, showtime. Alphabetical order like we practiced.”

Every eye was off me by then. While the kids in robes bobbed from one seat to another across the front, I waited for the families to settle themselves on the rear folding chairs, then I took a seat two in from the back corner. The Asian woman, still clutching that purse strap with her white knuckles, dropped onto the chair beside me.

“Are you Peter Giller?” she asked quietly. “Okay if I sit here? I'm Helen Bradford, I'm Grace's mom. You remember Grace?”

She raised her thin eyebrows, against the expectation that no one in Hoover would recall Grace. Really,
Grace
?

So I imagined the heat and light in that pig-farm walk-in cooler—the last sensations Grace ever had of this world. How she must've wanted her mom then. Wanted her, wanted her, then the bright light, too much heat for a nervous system to even register.

Thanks to that line of thought I folded up, put my face in my hand and let go a sob that shuddered up from under my kidneys. Snot streamed out of my nose and down my shirt cuff, and my ribs heaved because I couldn't get air in. Helen Bradford's light hand moved up and down my back. But Cam was welcoming all the parents and hangers-on by then, making a joke about the basketball team that got laughs and applause, so I didn't imagine anyone was paying me much attention. Just another wigged-out parent afraid to watch his chicks fly. The grads woo-hooed.

“All right,” Cam announced, “now the jazz choir's going to give us a treat.”

They started harmonizing a four-part arrangement of “Hakuna Matata” from
The Lion King
, Josie's second-favorite movie, and I straightened up in my folding chair as though this were the song I'd relied on to get me through the darkest nights. The choir members were all homely, with chin-length hair so I couldn't tell girls from boys.

I found the handkerchief Mark had dutifully placed in my inside pocket. Helen lifted her hand away and we smiled at each other like we'd survived an earthquake together, then she worked her own dripping nose into a Kleenex.

“You still live here?” I asked shakily.

She shook her head, balling up the tissue. “I came from Los Angeles.”

The choir filed from the stage and I recognized Kirsten née McAvoy sitting up beside Cam. Her hair was longer now and parted down the middle, and though that may sound dowdy she looked ten years younger.

“We had a tie for valedictorian this year,” Cam said into the microphone. “And with Megan starting up the sock hops and Clint taking over tornado drills, well, that just seemed fair. So give a big hand to Megan Avery and Clint Denham!”

Two figures popped up from the field of mortarboards, then seemed to float across the stage. Everyone clapped, some kids getting to their feet. I thudded my hand against my thigh and stomped my feet. Clint's hair burst from under his cap like palm fronds, and Megan's blond dreadlocks swayed around her shoulders. Had Hoover held a hair-growing contest? They stood hip to hip, each gripping an edge of the podium. Colleen had to be sitting proudly in the crowd somewhere, but none of the backs of heads looked familiar.

“Hi,” said Megan, her voice sounding fuller, throatier. “Twelve of our classmates died together in an accident last year, I guess everyone here knows that. Last year's grad class was bigger than ours, and next year's will be too.”

“Woo!” yelped the spiky-haired kid in front of me.

Represent
, Amber would've said.

“We knew those guys really well,” said Clint. “And if they were here they'd want us to celebrate. So we're going to celebrate.”

Mrs. Bradford shifted toward me to give a sympathetic frown, and I made myself give her a bleary smile, then had to push past her and stride long-legged for the exit, looking to all the grandpas like every other ice cream–suited asshole out in the world who figured he had more important places to be. I swabbed my eyes with the hankie. I fantasized that
d.s. 4
's packaging said
may inhibit grieving
, in which case I'd mainline it into my neck.

“Hunh,” I heard myself saying.

Of course there were sobs behind me too, the victims' aunts and stepdads who still saw that gauze fall behind their eyes even though for months they'd been holding it together. I heard them now while Megan hollered, like Henry V, about partying, but I knew Alice expected me to have more decorum than the rest of the stricken. Snot would not advance civilization either.

“And we'll do that tonight,” Clint promised, “and every night!”

Out in the hall, I let the gym door click shut behind me. A freckled woman in a sundress shuffled past, saying “
shuh-shuh
”
robotically while pushing a limp child in a stroller. As I quietly emptied my nose into the hankie, the boy sat up unsteadily and the freckled woman leveled a glare over her shoulder before disappearing around the corner toward the staff room.

Then I blew my nose with great volume as the ruddy-faced, hairy headshots of the Class of '81 gazed from their mahogany frame.

“Sorry,” I called.

Restrained applause from inside the gym. I still needed to congratulate Megan and Clint, so did I wait in the hallway for an hour? My car was parked behind the metal shop but I had let Driver Mark wander up to the town library so he could skim through
Hunter-Gatherer
microfilm for hilariously gory harvesting accidents—his Chicago sister was an aficionado—and
even though the car was an automatic and I had keys, I didn't feel like driving four blocks to get him.

Instead I pawed my wallet out of my jacket and shuffled down to the benignly rattling pop machine in which Pepsi was still only seventy-five cents.
This
was what had pulled me back to Hoover. The deep blue can thudded to the bottom and I pressed it against my hot face, focusing all mental energies on the searing cold so I could quit thinking about Grace.

“Oh, yes, sir. Peter Giller, is it?”

A man's voice, an older man, and thanks to my non-ears I figured he was ten feet behind me but when I straightened up he was so close in front that I could've slapped him. His hair was white stubble.

“Sure,” I said. “I'm Peter.”

“Affirmative! I believe we have things to say to each other, sir.” But he dropped his pointed chin against his chest and jammed his hands into his pockets like he couldn't work up the nerve to ask the soda machine to dance. “Ahem.”

The fluorescents cast his diffused shadow in three directions; his brown suit smelled like a car floor mat in August after a kid had spilled chocolate milk on it and not told anybody. Maybe in San Luis Obispo I'd smelled like that.

“Can I help you?” I asked, without the deferential tone I'd perfected at clinics.

He pointed a square-nailed finger at the Pepsi. An angry-looking eagle's head was tattooed on the back of his hand.

“I'll have one of those, sure. Thirsty as—don't know. Hm. Thirsty as a horse! Little time before you need to be somewhere?”

Well, hadn't I been wondering how to kill the next hour? I set the can beside my shoe and flopped my wallet open. He slid his feet from side to side like he had to pee, and where his jacket parted, his belly looked distended, his waistband stretched tight. Irritable bowel syndrome? I could help.

“I've only got nickels,” I said. “How much you got? I'll donate them.”

“Oh, that's okay.” He rubbed his chin, worked his tongue around his mouth. “I was on the ground floor with this ruddy thing, and what'd I get out of it? Guy can't buy me a Pepsi. It'll rot your pancreas, though, so I don't much care. I saw you on
tv
this morning, and when Harold Sayers trotted out your good works in the Congo, and the look on, well, on your truncated face was just…
this guy needs educating
, that's what I thought. You know him well, Harold Sayers?”

“Who?”

“Harold Sayers,
tv
weatherman? Strikes me as a good man. Now, me, I want everything above board, none of this—don't know what
your
life's been like in every respect, but I'm put out by men behind the curtain, aren't you? If not for you, these high school kids would be going to the Congo! This all ought to be a party for you, and the valedic-tor-ian ought to give you one of their arms, hey? Pop it up your sleeve, everybody cheers!”

“There are two valedictorians in there.”

“So you'd have three arms, think of your tennis game
then
! You play? Never thought to ask.”

“Heh,” I said.

My buckled loafer knocked the Pepsi over, but I didn't think it wise to take my eyes off the old man while I bent down to retrieve it. By then Driver Mark ought to have stepped in with his brawny forearm.

“Excuse me, Peter.”

Colleen at my elbow, her hair longer too, tucked behind her ears with wide silver-beige streaks through it. She took my wrist in her two small hands.

“Oh, thank god,” I said to her.

“Come back in. They just finished the diplomas.” She smiled, though in her eyes it was a wince. She wore low heels and a pinstripe skirt and blazer. “They're starting the slideshow for the kids, the ‘In Memorium.' ”

“Now, you're the wife, I remember.” The old man smiled shyly at her, all dry lips, but then his cream-colored teeth came into view. “You're holding up well.”

He was such an old tomcat, I'd expected to see a snapped-off fang. Colleen squeezed my wrist so hard like she might've been barefoot waterskiing.

“The
wife
?” she asked him. “Have we met?”

“Doug Avery was your husband!” He shook his head, overjoyed that she couldn't remember her own husband. “Doug Avery, correct? Dead up on Hawthorne Street, oh, flattened!”

She kicked the can too, and it rolled toward the trophy case.

“Have we?” Her voice cracked. “Have we met?”

“Yes, ma'am, and on that very fateful day!” He threw his shoulders back, barking up at the light fixtures. “Svendsen, Christopher, US Air Force lieutenant, retired, and friend to the common man!”

My hand on the small of her back, I felt her spine go straight as rebar. Restrained applause from inside the gym.

“Flattened?” she asked.

“Well, Mr. Svendsen,” I said, “I've come a long way to see this slideshow.”

I bumped the gym door with my hip and piloted Colleen through, toward hundreds of black silhouettes with blue light on their faces. The movie screen was down. In my parting glance Svendsen bent spryly at the knees to retrieve the can of Pepsi.

Through the half-light, Mrs. Bradford saw us coming and shifted over to leave us two free chairs. She patted Colleen's sinewy hand as we sat down, then gripped her white purse against her belly. On the screen, a blond girl with braces—
Kathy Ackerman
—sat astride a springy horse at a playground.

“Don't remember her on the trip,” I murmured.

“She wasn't,” Colleen said in my ear. “Drug overdose last summer.”

Grace Bradford in a
nbzambi march
T-shirt, flashing a peace sign.

“Oh,” her mom said. “That's good.”

Willow Cooke squinting on a golf course, Little Craig nowhere in sight. Then Lydia, Ryan, Eric, each sitting by a Christmas tree or astride a pony. I'd remembered them as all being much cooler. An emaciated-looking girl I didn't recognize—anorexia?

“Car accident two weeks ago,” whispered Colleen.

No Franny Halliday? But Little Craig, both cheeks intact, in a karate
gi
on an oil-stained driveway. Ursula Leiber, Shawn Melloy with an electric guitar but no amp, Eric Millar. Amber grinning in an orange bikini on a muddy-looking beach—not appropriate, but probably how she'd have wanted to be remembered. Grandmas clucked their tongues. Jacob Rhenisch, coldsores and all, crouched over a red-eyed cocker spaniel.

“Ah!” somebody said: the image captured Jacob's abiding essence.

I steeled myself for Harvey Saunders to appear onscreen, probably in his blue Hoover Hooves uniform, basketball pinned between forearm and hip, all teeth and bright eyes like a Prairieland Dairy ad. I felt my eyes heat up despite myself, and I had to swallow whatever was in my throat.

But instead an
in memorium
title flashed on the screen, the lights came back up and people shifted in their seats and coughed. No governmental authority could say officially whether Harv or Franny were dead because, thanks to me, no trace of them had ever been found. Cam and Dreaper monkeyed with the screen above their heads—the cord to roll it up had to be tugged with a ten-foot pole but neither of them could manage it. Colleen sat dry eyed beside me, her lips pressed together like the edges of two bricks.